Mobile stations communicate with each other across various types of networks. In some networks, a tone or beep is transmitted to a mobile station to indicate that a connection has been made and communications can begin. “Falsing” occurs when a tone or beep is sent to the originating mobile station, but the target mobile station is not available or is otherwise unable to receive the tone/audio. The target mobile station may not be available because the mobile station is busy, the power is turned off, the mobile station has moved, or for other types of reasons or situations.
Previous systems attempted to minimize the problem of falsing in various ways. For example, in one previous approach, the originating mobile station first transmitted a page request to the target mobile station. The target mobile station received the page request and sent a page response back to the originating mobile station. The originating mobile station then responded by transmitting an INVITE message to the target mobile station. Finally, the target mobile station received the INVITE message and responded by sending an OK message to the originating mobile station. A tone was then sent to the originating mobile station. This approach reduced falsing since it required that the target mobile station be actually available before a tone was sent to the originating mobile station. Unfortunately, it was also slow, consumed significant amounts of system resources, and tended to degrade the performance of the system.
In another previous approach, an INVITE message was delivered over a Forward Data Over Signal (F-DOS) link to a target mobile station and an OK message was subsequently generated at the target mobile station and sent back to the originating mobile station using a Reverse Data Over Signal (R-DOS) link. While reducing the problem of falsing, this approach unfortunately negatively impacted the paging capacity of the system by consuming significant amounts of valuable system resources.
In still another previous approach, the target mobile station was paged and the target mobile station transmitted an OK message over the R-DOS link. This method verified that the target mobile station was available before a tone was sent to the originating mobile station. However, this approach also often caused unacceptable reverse link loading and this loading adversely affected system performance.
Consequently, previous approaches that reduced falsing in networks also required too much time to complete, negatively impacted paging, and/or increased loading in the system to unacceptable levels. These effects, in turn, negatively impacted the service quality associated with communications made within the network, thereby increasing user frustration with the performance of the system.
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